The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slapOf soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edgeThrough living roots awaken in my head.But I've no spade to follow men like them.Between my finger and my thumb The squat pen rests.I'll dig with it.

History says don't hopeOn this side of the grave.But then, once in a lifetimeThe longed for tidal waveOf justice can rise upAnd hope and history rhyme.So hope for a great sea-changeon the far side of revenge.Believe that a further shoreis reachable from here.Believe in miraclesand cures and healing wells.

"Doubletake", from The Cure at Troy (1990)

Call the miracle self-healing: The utter self-revealing double-take of feeling. If there's fire on the mountain Or lightning and storm And a god speaks from the sky

That means someone is hearing the outcry and the birth-cry of new life at its term.

My poetry journey into the wilderness of language was a journey where each point of arrival turned out to be a stepping stone rather than a destination.

From Nobel Prize for Literature speech 1995

The writing of certain poems (eg 'The Guttural Muse and others)took me to the bottom of myself, something inchoate but troubled, you might say I had muddied the waters, but I felt these poems arrived from an older , deeper, cleaner spring.

I don't mean sound as decoration or elaboration, but the actual cadence that moves the thing along.